Another potentially great movie destroyed in post-production
Today was my first time watching this flick, on DVD, because, oddly enough, I was a missionary in South America when this was released.
I almost hit the stop button several times because I could recognize how bad it was from the very get go.
The theme music (if you could indeed call it that) was by far the worst I have ever heard attached to any form of entertainment. It was called "Electric Ensemble" which just plain did NOT do a very good job of doing anything.
Usually, music is supposed to be a cue to the audience as to what all else might be going on in the minds of the characters being performed by the actors. Not this stuff. All the music ever did throughout the movie as a way of changing anything was to change key. There was no change of mood, no distinct themes for different characters, none of that.
Music can make or break a movie, just take a look at Harrison Ford's two blockbusting franchises: Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Music plays a very important role in those.
In this one, however, not even close.
With the right music accompanying each act and scene of the flick, we might have been able to tell right off that this wasn't Harrison Ford's movie at all, but River Phoenix'. We might have been given some not nearly so subtle clues that Harrison Ford's character was migrating not just from one location to another to another, but from one mental state to another to another.
And then, there's the editing. There was so much of that movie that just plain HAD to have been cut out, probably to keep the movie from becoming so long without good music that it was even worse than boring. There were so many places in the flick where you see people doing things that make no sense... until later. Who wants that? In a mystery sure. In a spy movie, yes. In a drama? Not on your life. One or two unexplained things might be bearable, but in this movie there were literally dozens of things being done and not being explained at all until later.
Not the makings of a good movie. And done to the movie in Post Production.
In reading these posts, I see that lots of people think Harrison Ford's acting was way too much. Hardly. The acting was pretty much what it needed to be in order to reach the conclusions made by almost everybody else in the movie at its climax. The directing, ergo, was by no means bad. The sets were mostly exactly what they needed to be.
It was in Post-Production that this movie happened to fall to pieces.
Quite sad, I think, because nobody who just watched it with me liked it at all. Not one bit. They all actually up and left right in the middle of it.
And I can't really say that I blamed them. I imagine it's just artists and art lovers like me who felt the urge to watch it for what it was, not for what it wasn't.
Quite a shame, really.
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>**Dash the Neighbors! And, dash the expense!"